Exploring Time Capsule: 10/100/1000 Ethernet vs. 802.11g/n Wireless Networking

Published: 08:30 AM EST

Time Capsule, like most of Apple's earlier AirPort base stations, can handle both wired and wireless networked devices, but is optimized for serving wireless clients. This segment, the fourth of six exploring Time Capsule in depth, highlights the differences between wired and wireless networking on Time Capsule and the AirPort Extreme.

Time Capsule and the AirPort Extreme are designed primarily to serve wireless clients, providing a convenient and minimally invasive way to network systems in a home or small office to support centralized backups, file sharing, and media streaming. Wired Ethernet networking is nearly always going to be much faster, but also requires running wires through walls and tethering mobile devices to an Ethernet jack.

For the purposes Time Capsule is designed, including Time Machine backups and simple file and print sharing, the speed advantages of Ethernet are less of a factor compared to the needs of users who want a blazing, hard wired RAID array supplying high speed Network Attached Storage.

All of Apple's recent AirPort base stations have included an Ethernet switch, which allows user to directly plug in devices using an Ethernet cable; the base station bridges those wired clients to any devices attached wirelessly, so all can appear on the same AirPort created network.

However, while the AirPort base stations support full speed Ethernet switching, the shared disk file serving capacity of Time Capsule and AirPort Extreme is not tuned to saturate a big Ethernet pipe. That means the effective speed of the base stations' wired networking jacks are not competitive with a standalone NAS or dedicated file sharing computer. The numbers below (and